Artist, Mother Shows Love on Brown Paper Bags

Oct 07, 2015 11:23AM
● By Bryan Scott

Portraits of the Singleton girls. These were their lunch sacks on the first day of school this year.

By Erin Dixon

Did your mother hide a note for you in your lunch sack before you ran to catch the bus? If you find a Singleton girl at school during lunch time, you might find her with a different sort of note. Her bag might be sporting a spider in October or an elf in December.

Katie Singleton, mother of three daughters, leaves her message on the outside of the brown bag rather than inside. On their first day of school, Jaden, Sienna and Macy each left the house with their own portrait drawn on their lunch sack.

“It makes me feel good because I know they’re at school away from home and there’s a piece of me with them even though I’m not there with them,” Singleton said.

Most of her drawings take five to 10 minutes, while more complicated images still only take her 20-30 minutes. She draws on the lunch sacks about three times a week.

Singleton graduated with a degree in art, from the University of Utah, and taught for some years after before starting a family with her husband, Peder.

Now she teaches her children. From their mother’s example, all three girls have grown to love art; from origami in the living room to the ceramic studio in the garage.

“Kids are just so happy with a ball of clay. A three-year-old can make something out of clay. When it starts snowing, we do snowflakes, but we are extreme. We do not do eight-pointed snowflakes. We do six-pointed snowflakes and we put a lot of work into them,” Singleton said.

Drawing on her children’s lunch sacks is a small way she keeps her talents alive while juggling the busyness of family life.